Countess Dracula (11 page)

There was one more gruesome entertainment for the citizens of Byt
č
a that January. On the 24th of the month the stake was raised again in the meadow outside the town and the kindling and faggots piled around it. Without ceremony and without, it seems, any formal trial, the other named confidante of the Lady of
Č
achtice, the old woman Erzsi ‘Majorosné' (the name translates as Beth ‘the Farmer's
Wife'), the witch of Myjava, who had, it was said, helped the Countess to bake her magic cake with which to kill her enemies, was brought out and burned alive for sorcery. The farmer's wife was rushed to her death without being questioned, without being required to undergo the ordeal by water or the oath purgatory, which would have proved or disproved her guilt.

We might, as most historians of the last century did, accept the evidence presented here as being trustworthy, and take this as the whole of the story. But the trials of the servants at Byt
č
a, the condemnation
in absentia
of their mistress and the burning of her witch was neither the beginning nor the end of the official investigation into the alleged massacre of virgins. Nor is it possible for us to judge Elisabeth Báthory finally for ourselves until we have considered her life and her age in more detail, and examined the remainder of the documents that have been left for us by her accusers and by the Lady herself.

Compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses

Hebrews xii: 1

The secret interrogations of 1610 ~ hearings at Vág Újhely ~ the March testimonies ~ visions of purgatory ~ Pastor Ponikenus' denunciation ~ cannibal feasts ~ some rituals, portents and omens ~ vampires and other supernatural beings

All the indications are that Elisabeth Báthory was taken by surprise when the authorities arrested her, but the process which culminated in the raid at the end of December 1610 had been set in motion nearly a year before, almost as soon as George Thurzó, her neighbour turned adversary, had been confirmed in his post as Palatine of Hungary. Some historians have written that after hearing rumours of atrocities committed in his own city King Matthias had ordered the inquiry into Elisabeth's activities from Vienna; others, starting with the eighteenth-century Jesuit Father Túróczi, suggested that the parents of missing girls must have lobbied Count Thurzó until he was forced to take action.
¹

But there is absolutely no hard evidence for either of these theories.
Imagination, of course, also abhors a vacuum, so a more romantic rationale emerged. Paget introduced the tale to English readers:

At last, however, Elisabeth called into play against her two passions stronger even than vanity or cunning – love and revenge became interested in the discovery of the mystery. Among the victims of Csejta was a beautiful maiden who was beloved by and betrothed to a young man of the neighbourhood. In despair at the loss of his mistress, he followed her traces with such perseverance, that, in spite of the hitherto successful caution of the murderess, he penetrated the bloody secrets of the castle, and burning for revenge, flew to Pressburg [Bratislava], boldly accused Elisabeth Báthori of murder before the Palatine, in open court, and demanded judgement against her.
²

It was normal to assemble a great volume of evidence before starting a trial against a high-ranking defendant, and the sequence of preliminary hearings, the actual trial and the post-trial deliberations would frequently take years. A lord or lady could expect to be formally summonsed to appear well before being taken into custody or having to present themselves before the court, and it was at that point that many defendants simply left the country and waited for the political climate to change, or petitioned for a pardon on the ground of their rank. In the matter of the rumoured crimes of Elisabeth Báthory the officials appointed to supervise the investigation made their first moves at the end of February 1610 when the Countess was staying at her usual winter residence at Sárvár.

The first letter of interrogation was issued on 5 March 1610. Andrew Keresztúry, a notary of the royal chamber, received this evidence recorded in Latin to be used later in a formal trial if needed. The thirty-four witnesses, all from the environs of
Č
achtice in Nitra county in Upper Hungary, were brought together in secret at the market town of Vág Újhely, the present-day Nové Mesto nad Váhom in Slovakia, only a few kilometres from
Č
achtice itself.
³

The witnesses were mostly people of low birth: fourteen of them were the serfs of Daniel Pongrácz, the lord who shared the lands around the castle of Beckov with the Nádasdys, seven were the serfs of Peter Ráttkay and five were the serfs of Francis Mágóchy, lesser gentry owning adjoining estates.
⁴
These, then, are humble near-neighbours who would
not have been allowed to enter Countess Báthory's properties without her invitation. They mainly refer to news that they had heard rather than to events that they had witnessed with their own eyes and are reticent in comparison with witnesses testifying later in the investigation – understandably so, given that the Lady they were being asked to accuse was still at large and was their most powerful neighbour.

Three of Daniel Pongrácz's tenants, George Predmerský, Nicholas Kochanovský and George Blanár, stated that Countess Elisabeth Báthory had killed two maidens and had taken them to the village of Kostol'any to be buried. George Gasparovi
ć
, the fourth to be summoned, confirmed that there had been at least one mysterious death connected with Kostol'any, and many of the witnesses also referred to an incident which seems to have taken place there in 1592 in which a young girl was given an ‘ice-bath' in a brook on Countess Báthory's orders, after which the girl died.

Another of Pongrácz's men, Nicholas Kuzchleba, testified that he had heard from a certain Potocký, who served Thurzó's fellow lord Count Stephen Illésházy, that the Lady had cruelly murdered two maidens from well-born families in Liptov by whipping them, then ducking them in the icy Váh river near the clifftop fortress of Stre
č
no.

The eleventh witness, Nicholas Mezari
ć
, a debt and tithe collector from the town of Nové Mesto declared that the
Č
achtice manor warden (he did not name the individual) had asked a John Sl'uka from Vrbové to obtain medicines from the pharmacy in Nagyszombat (today the town of Trnava). The pharmacist, Dr Márton, who called himself by the Latin name of Graimelius, had told Sl'uka that the drugs he had been asked for were sufficient to kill about a hundred people.

One Ladislas Å aary said that girls had been whipped until they bled, then lashed again with stinging nettles, before being submerged in icy water. The next-but-one witness John Morav
č
ik also referred to the icy-water baths, which he had been told about by one of Báthory's servants named Mazalák; he further confessed that he heard from others who had been selling salt that when Stephen Báthory (Elisabeth Báthory's elder brother) died, the Widow Nádasdy, as she was travelling past his estates, buried two girls in Liptov. The next group to testify, John Mesar, John Pesthy, Nicholas
Č
isar, John Benco, John Kraj
č
ovi
ć
and George Maidanek, agreed that before the wedding of his lordship George Drugeth of Homonna to Elisabeth's daughter, there had been two murders, and afterwards there was another mysterious funeral.

Stephen Mokor, the twenty-sixth witness, said he had heard many times that the widow in her court was cruel to the living virgins. The twenty-seventh witness, Michael Dubnický, confessed that he did not know or see anything personally, but he heard from many people that the widow, Mistress Nádasdy, her ladyship, did cruel things in her court to living maidens and girls. The next witness, Martin Komarek, endorsed the previous witnesses' stories. Some witnesses reported that they had seen maidens with their hands bound, others that girls in the Mistress's carriage appeared to have burns on their hands.

Several had heard that there had been a funeral without the prescribed tolling of the bells and without the due ceremonies, an assertion which was confirmed by Michael Fábry, the priest at Kostol'any, who was the last to give evidence at this hearing. He stated that two girls who had been murdered at
Č
achtice had been buried in Kostol'any without a priest so that no one should learn of their deaths.

There are several points worth noting in weighing up this first round of depositions, apart from the fact that the testimonies are cautious and based almost wholly on hearsay. Firstly, it is quite likely that the citizens of Nové Mesto itself would be hostile to the Nádasdy family, given that they feared the interference of this most powerful feudal clan in their relatively free trading activities (the town of Nové Mesto had been granted grazing rights, the right to sell its own wine and to hold a lucrative annual fair). Most of those heard, however, were tied servants of a rival feudal estate, that of the Squire of Beckov, Daniel Pongrácz, who was a descendant of the Hunt–Poznán dynasty which had ruled the region long before the arrival of the Nádasdys. Recent research has uncovered another intriguing connection between his family and the neighbouring Nádasdys which may point to a resentment deeper than the usual coveting of land. Daniel Pongrácz's wife was Anna Majláth, the daughter of the nobleman Gábor Majláth and Lady Anna Bánffy, and forty years earlier Francis Nádasdy's father, Count Thomas and his wife Lady Ursula Kanizsai, who were then without an heir, had considered adopting the boy Gábor Majláth and bequeathing him their vast inheritance. Before they could conclude this arrangement, Ursula became pregnant with a child, the long-hoped-for son, Francis, Elisabeth's husband, and the hopes of the Majláth family were dashed.
⁵

The accusations made by all the witnesses, even if based on rumour, are fairly consistent – which does not itself say anything about their
authenticity – and two main themes emerge strongly. The first is that bathing in icy water, for whatever reason, was practised by Elisabeth's entourage, and the second is that it was widely believed that girls who had died were being buried without ceremony and in secret. Not for the last time, the local priest was willing to give evidence against the Countess, but without explaining how it was possible that he knew so little about so much. The question of poison, which was strongly hinted at by Mezari
ć
, was not developed by other witnesses, but the fact that drugs were being purchased by the Báthory court may be significant in another connection. The substance in question was not named, but Sl'uka later confirmed that it was antimony, indeed a poison, but widely used in very small doses by professional and amateur healers.

There is another strand within the evidence lodged against Elisabeth Báthory, one which first appears in the statement by Nicholas Kuzchleba. This witness refers to ‘well-born' victims, and the theme of noble girls being abused is emphasised more and more as the confessions are collected. The wellbeing and the lives of commoners counted for very little in feudal Hungary and any serious attempt to indict the Countess would depend on proving that she had harmed persons of consequence. If, as some recent commentators suspect, the whole purpose of the investigation – at least at the beginning – was to outrage Elisabeth's fellow aristocrats and alienate them from her for political reasons, it was vital to show that she had scorned the inviolable status of the nobility.

The second stage of the investigation took place almost simultaneously, the mandate being issued on 25 March 1610. This set of hearings was organised under the supervision of Keresztúry's fellow notary, Moses Cziraky from the tabular court of Bratislava (the supreme legal assembly which was headed by the Palatine), and examined eighteen witnesses from the county of Vas, where the court of Sárvár was situated, and the surrounding districts of Györ, Sopron, Moson, Veszprém and Zala, all in the west of the kingdom.
⁶
The specifics – names and methods of torture, for instance – given in these statements show a consistency, but differ from those recorded in the north of the country. The language, too, is different: whereas the style of speech used by the serfs of Nitra county often seems like the repetition of a formula – one nervous peasant echoing his predecessor's words – these more privileged officials and courtiers provide ‘colourful' detail and anecdotes.

The first witness, Benedict Bicsérdy, the warden of Sárvár castle, declared that 175 girls and women were taken out dead from the house of the Lady, but of the nature of their deaths he was ignorant, because he was not there unless summoned by the Lady. But he once saw that the wall was stained with blood; it must have been the blood of the torture victims, and he knew that she was beating her girls, so much so that when walking around the castle he heard the sound of the beatings, some of which went on for six hours at a time.